In the telephone industry, conventional connectors are provided in the form of a modular plug and a modular jack. The jack may be installed on the wall of a room or on the body of a telephone so that it can be connected to the modular jack installed at the end of a cable, to provide connection between the telephone and an external line.
Such modular jack-type connectors also have been used widely on equipment other than telephone equipment, such as data processing equipment which may be incorporated adjacent to a telephone exchange, computers and like equipment. The use of such modular jacks in this type of equipment often requires that the jack be mounted on a circuit board.
Most such jacks include an insulating body made of plastic material, with a plug insertion hole formed in a front end of the body to receive a plug having contact means. Wire contacts are assembled in the insulating body, inserted into contact insertion holes therein, with free spring end portions exposed in the plug insertion hole in the body for contacting the plug contact means when the plug is inserted into the insertion hole.
A continuing problem with such modular jacks is in mounting the conductive spring contacts in the insertion holes of the insulating body and maintaining the contacts in proper position. A dilemma is encountered in sizing the insertion holes so that the contacts easily can be inserted thereinto, but still maintaining the contacts in proper position for engaging the plug contact means as well as preventing the contacts from backing out of the insertion holes when exteriorly exposed tail portions of the contacts are electrically coupled to external circuitry, such as inserting the tail portions into holes in a printed circuit board. If the contact insertion holes in the body are too small, it is very difficult to simultaneously insert a plurality of contacts in a mass production environment. If the insertion holes are too large, the contacts have a tendency to misalign and can back out of the insertion holes.
This invention is directed to solving this continuing problem by providing a modular jack construction wherein the spring contacts are easily inserted into the insulating body and still maintained in proper position by interference fits.